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''War Is a Racket'' is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit (including war profiteering) from warfare. After his retirement from the Marine Corps, Butler made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a small book with the same title that was published in 1935 by Round Table Press, Inc., of New York. The booklet was also condensed in ''Reader's Digest'' as a book supplement which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the ''Reader's Digest'' version, Lowell Thomas, the "as told to" author of Butler's oral autobiographical adventures, praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".〔''OLD GIMLET EYE: Adventures of Smedley D. Butler'', Farrar & Rinehart, 1933〕 ==Book== In ''War Is A Racket'', Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists whose operations were subsidised by public funding were able to generate substantial profits essentially from mass human suffering. The work is divided into five chapters: #War is a racket #Who makes the profits? #Who pays the bills? #How to smash this racket! #To hell with war! It contains this key summary: :"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." The book has significance historically as Butler points out in 1935 that the US is engaging in military war games in the Pacific that are bound to provoke the Japanese. :"The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles." Butler explains that the common rationale for the buildup of the US fleet and the war games is fear that "the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「War Is a Racket」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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